PRATIK SPECIAL : International Poetry Festival of Trois-Rivières: A Festival Review by Nancy Reichl Lange

The world’s largest French-language poetry festival does not take place in Europe. It is held annually in Québec, a French-speaking province in eastern Canada. This is the International Poetry Festival of Trois-Rivières, which offers a remarkable program of activities along the banks of the majestic St. Lawrence River, halfway between Montréal and Québec City.

The festival was originally supported by the Fondation Les Forges, founded in 1984 by Gaston Bellemare, Jean-Marc Gauthier, Louise Gravel, and Marguerite Veilleux. The foundation’s mission is to promote Québec poetry and support poets from across the Francophone world, notably through educational and cultural activities.

In this spirit, the idea of creating a major event that would draw public interest by bringing poets into public spaces first took root in the early 1980s. In 1985, one year after the creation of the Fondation Les Forges, the project became a reality with the establishment of the festival and the Grand Prix de Poésie of the foundation. That year, eighty poets performed for five thousand poetry lovers at the first edition of the festival, and the celebrated songwriter and poet Félix Leclerc, guest of honor, declared Trois-Rivières the “Poetry Capital.”

Over time, under the presidency of Gaston Bellemare and the direction of Maryse Baribeau, the festival grew and diversified. After five years, it became international, while public attendance and the number of events continued to rise. By 2005, several thousand poetry enthusiasts were taking part in the many activities offered as the festival spread throughout the city—into various institutions, primary and college-level schools, and art galleries—while metal plaques engraved with quotations from guest poets began appearing on walls across town.

After forty years, the leadership was passed from Mr. Bellemare and Ms. Baribeau to a new team. The presidency is now held by Louise Dupré, winner of numerous national and international poetry awards, including the Governor General’s Award, the Jaime Sabines/Gatien Lapointe Prize, and the Vénus Khoury-Ghata Prize. Artistic and general direction is shared by Evelyne Charland and Étienne Poirier, who also lead the Trois-Rivières Book Fair. The transition was handled with great skill—combining continuity with renewal.

“The festival, for me, is full of memories,” recalled Louise Dupré, reflecting on the highly successful opening night, which introduced a fresh approach in both staging and content. “This festival, to which I am deeply attached, is a major cultural event in Québec. This year, our goals were continuity and innovation. It’s not about changing everything, but it is natural for a new team to bring its own touch. We want to reach diverse audiences—people of all tastes, younger audiences, and people from different regions. To do this, we aim to present poets from a variety of publishing houses, representing different poetic styles, including more emerging poets, poets from diverse backgrounds, and poets from various regions of Québec so that everyone feels represented. The workshop component is also particularly close to my heart. Seeing Francine Allard, who participated in festival workshops in past years, win the Chatillon Prize—and hearing her beautiful speech at the opening night—was especially moving.”

The new artistic director, Evelyne Charland, first encountered the festival during her college studies, thanks to a teacher from Trois-Rivières who required students to attend three events and write a report. Daughter of the late Denis Charland—an artist, publisher, and teacher who devoted his life to breaking down boundaries between artistic disciplines—Evelyne grew up immersed in the arts. Active in the cultural scene of the Mauricie region for twenty-five years as an actor, stage manager, and director, she hosted numerous festival events over the past decade and became artistic director of the Trois-Rivières Book Fair before taking on this new role. For her, beyond the quality of the poets, venues, and performances, the festive spirit of the event is essential. “The festival is a unique moment—a grand celebration of the arts. The variety of venues allows us to reach many different audiences. There is currently a strong resurgence of interest in poetry among young people. We hope to attract them to the festival by creating new types of events, like Electro-Poetry, where the literary evening becomes a dance floor with integrated improvisations. We’ve set ourselves a three-year horizon to adapt to the diversity of our publics.”

For general director Étienne Poirier—also a children’s author, teacher, and administrative director of the Trois-Rivières Book Fair, now taking on the festival’s general direction—the event is inseparable from the city. “Trois-Rivières is a city fused with literature, and it’s through literature that I discovered it and chose to live here. Two hundred poem excerpts adorn houses, park benches, and offer a year-round literary walk. The annual festival is an international gathering, yet deeply rooted in the community, with activities held in galleries, colleges, and schools, not only locally but in other cities around the world. The poem-lines strung across the city represent the festival as much as the readings held in cafés, restaurants, and cultural venues.”

Some attendees return year after year. Jean-Pierre Lambert is one such devoted festivalgoer. “You could say I entered poetry through this festival. I first came seven years ago, at the suggestion of my friend, the writer Michel Bouvrette, and I discovered a world I didn’t know—one I immediately fell in love with. Since then, I return every year to take part in workshops, listen to poets, and I always leave with a book by an author I’ve discovered here. I also met people with whom Michel and I formed a writing group. We write together all year and will be giving our first collective reading this fall in Saint-Jérôme!”

Curiously, poets from Québec themselves tend not to attend unless they are invited. Asked about this, Michel Leclerc, winner of this year’s Grand Prize, admits he is rather reclusive and generally avoids literary events unless he is participating. However, he says he was impressed during his first visit in 2022 by the quality of the organization and the scope of the festival.

For Gérald Gaudet—essayist and host of the major interviews for almost thirty years—the festival is “a celebration of the spoken word in spaces made for encounter.” “Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form,” he says, quoting Pierre-Jean Jouve. “It always leads us toward what we do not yet know. Each evening has its own color. And this year, there is a sense of freshness, a new energy. It’s very promising.

The dandy poet Jean-Paul Daoust, who has taken part in nearly every edition of the festival, shares this view. “This year, I noticed more young people coming to listen to the poets. You can feel the festival is on the right path and in good hands. The new team is very respectful of the heritage they are receiving—continuing the beautiful tradition of this magnificent event while exploring new strategies to share poetry.”

As for myself, I travel to Trois-Rivières each year with renewed pleasure whenever I am in Québec during the festival, eager to discover the great poetic voices from around the world who gather there. I cherish the privilege of this small world tour, where I can listen to poems read in their original languages by authors from abroad, after hearing their French translations.

One of my favorites last year was the narrative poetry of Zhao Si, a guest from Beijing, who said she was impressed by the number of performance opportunities the festival offered her and by discovering new ways of reading poetry to better reach the public. I returned home with her book, and with collections by other poets I would likely never have encountered without this festival. This year, I am thrilled to be invited, for the third time, as a poet, in October.  I look forward to meeting poets from all over the world and will come back home with their books. Their voices will stay with me, as I read them and discover more about them, in winter, at home.

                                                                                                                               –  Nancy Reichl Lange

Nancy R. Lange is an award-winning writer from Saint-Hippolyte, in Quebec province, whose work has been published internationally and translated into seven languages. A poet, workshop facilitator, and cultural organizer, she leads projects promoting women’s empowerment, environmental protection, cultural diversity, and collective expression. She is founder and literary director of Femmes de parole (Women of Speech), currently selected for the Rive Gauche in Paris prize, in France, and artistic director of RAPPEL: Parole-Création. Her recent books include Le manteau de Freya and Trajectoires/Traduire les lieux – tome 2.

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PRATIK INTERVIEW: SAMANTHA BROWNING SHEA "Appetite, Intuition, and Endurance"

 SAMANTHA BROWNING SHEA 

"Appetite, Intuition, and Endurance"

Samantha Browning Shea is an author and the Vice President of Georges Borchardt, Inc., a literary agency. A graduate of Colgate University, she brings to her fiction a deep understanding of the literary world, shaped by years of working closely with writers and books. Her debut novel, Marrow, marks an impressive arrival on the literary scene and has drawn attention for its emotional depth and finely observed storytelling. I met Samantha at the Lighthouse Literary Festival, in Denver where we were sharing the stage. Pre-publication copies of the book were being distributed there. I picked up a copy and asked her to sign it after our reading. Samantha was shy, unassuming, and gracious—qualities that felt quietly at odds with the fierce emotional undercurrents of her novel. I started reading Marrow on my flight back to New York and was immediately pulled in. There was something magnetic about it—its undercurrent of longing, its brush with magic and ecstasy, its sense of healing that felt earned rather than sentimental. The writing was controlled but alive, simmering beneath the surface. At the time, I was revising my own novel about my years as a neophyte among Naga sadhus and shamans, trying to figure out how to weave ritual and altered states into narrative without losing the reader. Reading Marrow felt like a quiet lesson in exactly that—how to bring intensity and transformation onto the page while keeping the story grounded and compelling. I carried the book with me to Kathmandu and finished it there while scouting singing monks and shamans for the upcoming Himalayan Literature Festival. It felt fitting. The novel stayed with me, its questions about appetite, resilience, and emotional survival echoing in unexpected ways. In this conversation, Samantha talks about the making of Marrow, what sparked the story, how her publishing life intersects with her writing life, and what it means to trust intuition while enduring the long process of bringing a novel into the world. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters —YS

Yuyu Sharma: Can you describe the challenges of your journey from literary agent to author in writing Marrow and bringing it to publication? Did your experience as an agent prove to be a help, a challenge, or both? How has it shaped your approach to writing this novel?

Samantha Browning Shea: The shift from agent to author was less a career pivot than an identity negotiation. For years, I’d lived on the other side of the desk thinking about structure, markets, timelines, how a book would survive in the world. Writing Marrow required me to loosen that grip. I had to let myself be messier, slower, more exposed than I was used to being with other people’s work. That was surprisingly hard. 

What ultimately helped most was realizing that the skills I’d built as an agent – patience, advocacy, determination – were transferrable. I just had to redirect them toward myself. Writing Marrow taught me what it actually means to trust a process I’ve watched hundreds of other writers endure. It made the journey to publication feel less like a professional milestone and more like a personal crossing: stepping into the same vulnerable terrain I’ve been asking others to walk for years.

Yuyu Sharma: First novels are often considered autobiographical, and many say that everyone has a novel within them waiting to be written. To what extent is Marrow autobiographical, and how much of yourself went into creating it?

Samantha Browning Shea: Marrow isn’t a memoir, but it is deeply shaped by my own experience. Like Oona, I was navigating infertility, and I wrote the novel in the midst of IVF treatments. The longing, the heartbreak, the way desire can feel almost tangible: all of that came from living through it myself. I didn’t set out to retell my story literally; instead, I gave the characters emotional truths drawn from my own life and let them move in ways I couldn’t. In that sense, the book is personal, but it also exists independently—a space to explore longing, hope, and resilience beyond my own circumstances.

Yuyu Sharma: Did writing Marrow involve any particular rituals, research, or immersion into witchcraft lore to capture authenticity?

Samantha Browning Shea: Yes, writing Marrow absolutely involved a kind of immersion. I spent a lot of time reading memoirs written by witches, spellbooks, folklore, anything that felt like it carried memory and magic. But I also created my own small rituals: lighting candles, carving sigils, burying little notes in the earth. Sometimes it felt like prayer, sometimes like play. It was less about being “authentic” to a historical practice and more about tuning myself into the emotional and spiritual truths of the story. Magic in the book is less about spells than about attention, intention, and surrender – the same way wanting something, or someone, can feel like a kind of power. Immersing myself in those practices helped me write from inside that feeling, so that the witchcraft and the longing could live together seamlessly on the page.

Yuyu Sharma: While the novel builds a Gothic world steeped in witchcraft and the supernatural, some readers may interpret it as ultimately dismissing these elements as gimmick, reflecting a Western skepticism toward spiritual or otherworldly practices. How do you respond to this reading?

Samantha Browning Shea: For me, the magic in Marrow is real, but it’s real on its own terms, not necessarily how Oona first imagines it. When I was going through IVF, I was desperate, and I encountered so many charlatans and quick fixes, people trying to take advantage of that kind of longing. That experience stayed with me and became part of what I wanted to explore in the book: what desperation makes us believe, who profits from it, and what might actually hold power.

At the same time, I wanted to leave space for ambiguity. Take the peppermint spell Oona performs at the end: is it the herb? The ritual? Or just her own desire, concentrated and released? I hope the reader feels that tension, because in my mind the magic is real, even if it doesn’t always conform to our expectations. It’s less about proving anything and more about living in the uncertainty between belief and skepticism, the way life, grief, and longing often are.

Yuyu Sharma: The scene of Oona feeding Gemma’s baby struck me with the quiet force of myth—it brought to mind the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, yet felt wholly your own, filled with tenderness and fierce grace. Could you share your literary influences, both American and international, and the writers who have shaped your work?

Samantha Browning Shea : I think I carry pieces of many writers with me, even if subconsciously, and it often shows up in the way I try to blend tenderness with tension. Charlotte McConaghy’s prose taught me how to make the natural world feel alive and urgent. Sophie Mackintosh’s work gave me permission to dwell in desire and disquiet, to let characters’ inner lives feel wild and strange. Leni Zumas and Rachel Yoder showed me how to explore the intimate, sometimes painful truths of women’s lives without flinching, how to give that interiority weight and grace.

I’ve also been deeply inspired by my own clients as a literary agent. Watching them trust the work, take risks, and find their voices has shaped the way I approach my own writing. I read widely, both American and international authors, and I’m drawn to voices that linger, that make the reader feel something almost mythic, like the quiet force you noticed in that scene with Oona and Gemma’s baby. These writers, and the writers I’ve represented, have shaped me not by offering templates, but by modeling the courage to write toward longing, grief, and love, in all its messy, luminous forms.

Yuyu Sharma: Oona’s mother and her dark world are portrayed as enigmatic and potently wicked. What inspired her character, and how did you navigate writing such a morally complex figure?

Samantha Browning Shea : Oona’s mother came from a mix of myth, memory, and what I think of as the earliest fertility stories, like the witch in Rapunzel. There’s something archetypal in that figure: powerful, frightening, morally ambiguous, but also deeply tied to creation, desire, and the life cycles we can’t control. I wanted her to feel alive in all her contradictions the way real people do, rather than simply “good” or “evil.”

Writing her meant inhabiting that gray space, leaning into both her darkness and her vitality. I tried to let her operate according to her own logic and her own needs, even when they collided with Oona’s world. The goal wasn’t to make her likable, but to make her feel necessary, essential, and human in the way that myths are: complex, mysterious, and capable of both harm and unexpected tenderness.

Yuyu Sharma: Were there moments during writing when Oona’s story surprised even you?

Samantha Browning Shea : Absolutely. Oona surprised me constantly. Early on, I imagined her arriving on the island with her desire for a baby as the driving force of the story, only to discover, through revision, that her primary motivation needed to be something deeper: magic, and more than that, belonging to her family of origin. That realization shifted everything. Her longing for a child became entwined with, but secondary to, her need to claim her inheritance, her power, and her place in that lineage. It was surprising and thrilling to watch her story reorganize itself this way, to see her desire and her identity emerge in ways I hadn’t anticipated when I first put pen to page. Writing Marrow became as much about discovering her as it was about shaping her.

Yuyu Sharma: What do you hope readers take away from Oona’s journey—about femininity, resilience, and the choices we make to claim our own power?

Samantha Browning:  Shea I hope readers see Oona’s journey as an exploration of what it means to want something fiercely and still remain whole. Her story isn’t about perfect choices or clean victories. It’s about listening to a pull that feels older than reason and learning how to live inside it. For me, femininity in Marrow isn’t softness or sacrifice; it’s appetite, intuition, and endurance. It’s the ability to keep going even when the path forward is unclear.

Resilience, in Oona’s case, doesn’t look like overcoming everything. It looks like deciding what she will and won’t surrender. The choices she makes are complicated and sometimes unsettling, but they’re also acts of self-definition. I hope readers come away feeling that power doesn’t always arrive as triumph. It often comes as recognition: of where you belong, what you believe, and what you’re willing to risk to claim it.

Yuyu Sharma: Are you working on another book? Could you share any updates on your future creative plans?

Samantha Browning Shea : I am! It’s still in the early stages, but it’s shaping up as a mystery/suspense novel set on an oyster farm in Cape Cod. I’m excited to explore the edges between reality and magic again – creating that same kind of tension and wonder I loved weaving into Marrow. There’s a lot I’m still discovering about the story, but I hope it will feel atmospheric, eerie, and a little wild in the way the setting and the characters allow.

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Upcoming Issue Release : Pratik A Magazine of Contemporary Literature Vol XX No 1

  

Pratik

A Magazine of Contemporary Literature

Vol XX No 1

Massachusetts Poets and Their Homes
Lloyd Schwartz • Mark Pawlak • Jennifer Martelli • B.G. Thurston
Doug Holder • Denise Provost • David P. Miller • Gloria Mindock

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets
John J. Trause • Anton Yakovlev • Claudia Serea • Zorida Mohammed
Jim Klein • Janet Kolstein • Mark Fogarty • R. Bremner
Arthur Russell • Donald Zirilli • Carole Stone

Interview
“Appetite, Intuition, and Endurance”
Samantha Browning Shea

Book Excerpt
Jeet Thayil — I'll Have It Here

CAROL LYNN GRELLAS  • LAKSMISREE BANERJEE •  MARTIN MAX AART DE JONG

Plus, Book Reviews, News Review & Regular Columns